An Interview with Alex Ross

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We chat with the artist behind Kingdom Come and Marvels.

By Ken P.

Even if you don't know Alex Ross's accomplishments within the comics field, you've probably seen his artwork.

His near photo-realistic portrayals of DC and Marvel characters have been seen on everything from posters to the cover of TV Guide. If you are a comics fan, then you know about his prestige work on Marvels, Kingdom Come, and Earth-X. Heck, he was even tapped to design a promotional poster for the Oscars a few years back.

Pantheon Books has just released a hardcover book spotlighting Ross's work within the DC universe. Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, written and designed by Chip Kidd, is crammed full of Ross's pieces, running the full gamut from Kingdom Come to his work with Paul Dini. The book also contains biographical info and insights into his process.

We also got a chance to talk with Ross about his background, his work, and a few other things under the sun&#Array;

IGN FILMFORCE: Mythology does delve into your background, but I was wondering if art was always the strongest pull for you, growing up&#Array;

ALEX ROSS: You mean as opposed to rock music or something?

IGNFF: That, or you obviously had family influences &#Array; you could have gone in the direction your father had gone&#Array;

ROSS: Not really! He wasn't exactly handing that influence down or anything. No, it was pretty much a singular focus. I mean, the idea of being a comics artist was pretty key in my mind from the age of four, I would say. I know that there are some art artifacts of my drawing from the age of three, but I'm not entirely sure what that all entails. I know that from the age of four there were those, like, folded over 8x10 sheets of paper on which I created my own comic books, based upon, say, watching Spidey on television or something.

IGNFF: I can relate, since you're pretty close to my age group&#Array;

ROSS: Well, did you catch Electric Company?

IGNFF: Oh yes&#Array;

ROSS: Okay&#Array; cool. Yeah, that's a very formative one. Just the vividness&#Array; Seeing a guy in a costume was especially powerful. I liken that to the fact that I became a realist in my adult life because I was always used to seeing characters in more than two dimensions. More than having an inkline surrounding a body, but in fact being as graphically realized as was possible.

IGNFF: Just comics-wise, on Electric Company you were looking at a living, breathing Spider-Man every morning&#Array;

ROSS: That's right.

IGNFF: I'm assuming that it wasn't till later that you discovered your mother's history in art &#Array; too late for it to be an influence&#Array;

ROSS: I can't say it's a real key memory. Certainly from a very young age I was aware of what she could do, but because she was barely ever doing it, it had no continued sort of impact on my mind.

IGNFF: As being a source of inspiration&#Array;

ROSS: Yeah. It wasn't like I copied what she was already doing. I remember, at a young age, encouraging her to do certain things, and there's a few drawing that she did for me based upon my superheroes &#Array; like showing her a comic image of the Hulk and saying, "Draw me a picture of the Hulk, mom." And the thing that would be so funny about it was it would be the most feminine drawings of characters like Hulk or Thor or whatever, because that wasn't her style of drawing. She was used to doing much more fashion illustration &#Array; more women than men, certainly. So, in a way, I had a distinct awareness as a kid that what path she was on and what she was into was a very, very different thing than what I was into.

IGNFF: Although it is fascinating to look at her work and see how similar it is to yours, style-wise&#Array; Or is that more a matter of the medium?

ROSS: Well, maybe a little bit, the medium. Certainly we were working with water-based paints, like gouache, but it has a lot to do just with the fact that we're both drawn towards realism. That classical illustration of the type that Rockwell, Loomis, Leindecker and all those people come from is something that is a focus for a lot of artists in the world and something that we gravitate towards, because it is what things are. It is the reality &#Array; as opposed to a more manufactured reality of fine art.

IGNFF: How would you place comic book art within that range of styles?

ROSS: Well, comic book art obviously allows for a lot of range of styles&#Array;

IGNFF: More representational?

ROSS: Comic art has its greatest root in cartooning&#Array; obviously more in exaggeration. The comic strip style &#Array; everything from Mickey Mouse to the Yellow Kid &#Array; exaggerated styles of how to show a figure. The energy that accompanies animation is something that infuses comics &#Array; so that to really achieve some kind of comic competency, you must have that as a fundamental part of the work. People obviously accuse me of being a stiff painter who's just applying these still images to an otherwise bright and lively form&#Array;

IGNFF: You mean Bruce Timm?

ROSS: Yeah&#Array; like Bruce Timm.

IGNFF: I still remember his comment that you should get rid of the reference, because he thought you were capable of much better work without it&#Array;

ROSS: Well, the thing is that there's still that much more left to learn. There's an infinite amount of things to see in reality &#Array; and obviously if I'm stiffening the stuff up with my looking towards reference too much, than that is a problem that certainly I need to focus on and work towards changing.

IGNFF: What is the importance of using reference? Because, obviously, you can draw without it &#Array; so it's not a crutch. But what strength do you draw out having a piece of reference in front of you?

ROSS: There's only so much recall the human mind seems to have &#Array; or at least mine, that's for sure. Most comic artist's styles, whether they're more exaggerated like Bruce or more representational like, say, Neal Adams &#Array; more realistic &#Array; all these things are based upon what things we've filled our heads with. And there's only so much, generally, that each artist has accumulated. The more realistic artists are the guys who've obviously studied and filled their heads that much more with exact figure shape and realism of lighting and outline, whereas your average comic artists is more based upon drawing from mind's eye and just imagination of how to render objects and people. So the more exaggerated styles, or just simple basic styles &#Array; everything from John Byrne to George Perez &#Array; that's not so much based upon reality as it is a certain form of cartooning. It's a reduction of reality to a basic&#Array;

IGNFF: Stylization&#Array;

ROSS: It's a basic stylization of how they've understood the world to be. In my feeling, it's almost like you've taken everything that your eyes can see &#Array; or that your eyes can collect &#Array; and then you've almost put a finger on stopping at a certain point and saying, "Okay, this is where I stop, and from this point I'm just going to create my own version of how I want things to be."

IGNFF: Becoming a filter?

ROSS: Well, I'm more of a filter. Most of your average comic artists are not going and studying life. They're basically just running forward with what their style has become, based upon the process of doing. Neither approach is bad. I guess the fundamentals of fine artists and illustrators over the years has been to always continue to look at the base &#Array; which is reality. So you're going to find, when you look back at your classic American illustrators and say, "These were guys that were always looking back at reality as the guiding point. And when you go back to your classical artists of many years gone by &#Array; your Da Vincis, your Michaelangelos &#Array; they were all working from life. They were looking at the equivalent of their reference, and since this is an attribute never discounted before in the history of art, what's ironic for me just as more of a basic illustrator is that I've gotten constant dissection over the fact that I'm looking at something real before I'm completing these fantastic images. Before I complete an image of, say, Green Lantern conjuring something up, I'm going to want to actually have a guy to base my Green Lantern on and see how close I can get to what's in my mind's eye with that model, that reference. Then fill in the rest from what I feel needs to be achieved that's not there through the photographic help.

IGNFF: So it's like a sculptor working with an armature&#Array;

ROSS: Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you're never going to get everything just perfect. When you see artists that are following from reference too closely &#Array; not reinterpreting enough &#Array; you're gonna wind up with these things where the characters, or the situations, seem less plausible because they do seem stiffer.